George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 July 2016.]
It’s convention season and in our dear land the political fur is flying. Tonight the Republicans will hear Donald Trump, their roughly anointed candidate for the presidency, accept his nomination and promise to sally forth to a November victory. And next week we will witness the same song and dance as the recently and tentatively exonerated Hillary Clinton accepts her mantle to lead the Democrats to the White House without appearing to detour too far to the left.
But what should impress all of us in this election season is the state of the world that our new president will inherit. Overseas our brittle and feckless foreign policy has given rise to a world overfilled with countries and movements that have elevated America into the top slot on their lists of enemies.
Russia, facing a huge demographic contraction of its aging workforce, has again solidified into a corrupt dictatorship that must once more seek internal stability by conquering neighbors to acquire wealth generating capacity. In the opposite direction China’s demographics generate more people than it can gainfully employ as advancing technology and its east Asian neighbors underbid the increasing costs of its own workers. And China too sees adventurism beyond its borders as the tried and tested means for autocracies to divert attention from their internal problems of economic mismanagement and corruption that has resulted in a stubbornly undersized middle class.
And the middle east has again settled into a permanent state of war motivated by our predictably tepid involvement on the side of our so-called allies. Iran’s program to become the region’s nuclear powered hegemon is funded and on course after being abetted by one of the most disastrous capitulations led by the United States. Islamist extremism, unrecognized by our leadership, has boiled out of its former confines and now regularly inflicts acts of terror around the world slaughtering hundreds of innocents every week. Meanwhile we and our European allies continue to import hordes of terrorist-embedded Muslim refugees into our lands.
NATO’s southern flank is unraveling as Turkey roils internally on its determined path to shed its secular government and become yet another Islamic state to contend with Iran for the region’s dominant hegemon, while the belt reaching from the Levant to northern Africa is aflame with a variety of metastasizing ISIS and Al Qaeda factions. All take strength from America’s withdrawal from the world scene and our existential demonstrations that we no longer understand that naked diplomacy is only a cover for bad actors to expand and achieve their own geo-strategic objectives while they paint us into a tighter and ever more dangerous corner.
At home we are a nation purposely divided by classes, ethnicities, and the even the gainfully employed within an historically stultifying economy in the grip of an unforgiving government. Over the last years the middle ground of compromise between federalism and progressivism has literally disappeared. Our Constitution is being crushed between the coordinated jaws of judicial legislation and end-run executive orders. Vote buying, through expanded entitlements, amnesty bamboozles, and manufactured racial tensions, has been raised to a new form of political artistry. Unfounded and federally uncontested statistics about blue-on-black killings today unravel race relations which had been improving for decades. Some observers even see us being on the verge of open racial warfare (more here).
In light of all this we voters will have to decide which of the two highly debatable candidates will lead America through the tangles and minefields which we must navigate to retain our sovereignty and way of life, while we try to revive the American dream. One candidate is a volatile newcomer, unpracticed in politics, who promises to take us in radically new and untested directions. The other is a corrupt, distrusted, and scandal riven apparatchik of demonstrated incompetence who promises to stay the current course of which she is one of the proud architects.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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